Cartwheel Café and Roastery located on Low Pavement in Nottingham is a rather excellent place for a spot of lunch and brunch and I understand sells some of the best single origin coffee in the city.
On their website they say that their “food menu is carefully crafted to produce dishes that not only look good but taste delicious. Using locally sourced and healthy ingredients we hope to satisfy all your breakfast, brunch and lunch cravings!”
I have a lot of cravings to be satisfied so I made a couple of visits to check them out, purely out of interest, I mean I was just passing by you know 🙂
Lets see what they had to offer:
Very major important and serious brunch
On my first visit to Cartwheel Café I ordered the somewhat awesomely named “Very major important and serious brunch“. To be honest this was music to my ears as this is how I feel about all my brunches!
I am thinking that needs to be the name of all lunchtime meeting invites booked into my work calendar from now on.
I am not just ‘out for lunch‘ I have a “Very major, important and serious brunch!”
The menu was describing this dish as ‘poached eggs on sourdough, bacon, sausage patty. garlic and chive shrooms, homemade beans and potato hash‘.
It didn’t say oh and by the way this is going to be huge, so big that we will be bringing out a plate and three side bowls of food for you to attempt to chow through! ‘well it is major, important AND serious you know!’
The first plate arrived with a large slice of toasted sourdough in the centre upon which two poached eggs, two slices of bacon and a small fist sized sausage patty had been perched.
Yeh that was a BIG slice of toast!
Then three more dishes arrived alongside that first plate. The waiter had to make two trips to bring it all over!
So you got a bowl of crispy cubed breakfast potatoes which I assume was the ‘potato hash’. In itself this was enough potato for 2-3 people #excellent 🙂 then there was another large bowlful of sauteéd mushrooms mixed with chives and garlic, followed by a large bowl of their homemade beans which were mixed with a nice tomato sauce and a touch of what I think was paprika.
Maybe at this point I did feel slightly overwhelmed, but you know me, I was up for the challenge so I started scooping spoonfuls of everything onto the plate and started to tuck in. This was as promised one serious brunch, I mean there are cafés all over town proclaiming belly busting breakfasts and ultimate all day breakfast situations, but none of them can really touch this offering from Cartwheel.
It is not just that you get a lot of food, it is that you get a lot of really good quality food! To be honest I didn’t expect this much when I read the menu 🙂
The highlights are that it was all good, if I had to pick out anything for special mentions I would have to say that the sweet and spicy sausage patty was amazing, the bacon was also very good but it got lost under all that meat and egg on the toast, you would need about 4 slices if it was to compete and we didn’t need any more food getting in on this act! 🙂
I love their poached eggs and they were great with the toasted sourdough from the Welbeck bakery. To be honest (again) a couple of these eggs on toast would have been more than enough for a decent lunch.
The sides are worthy of star billing in their own right, I was loving their ‘potato hash’ which was very like the breakfast potatoes that I love ordering over in the states when I am living there. The menu described these as ‘crispy fried new potatoes seasoned with paprika salt’. I could have easily eaten a whole bowlful of these (oh I just did 🙂 )
I also loved those mushrooms that were cooked to perfection, sauteéd with chives, onion, and garlic, they were really juicy and would also make a great meal on a slice of sourdough toast too.
All in all this was a great brunch, a lot of food, perhaps too much, but thoroughly enjoyable all the same. I did not need to eat again for the rest of the day!
Smashed Avo and Poached Eggs
After the most enjoyable success of my first visit to Cartwheel I came back again with the plan to be somewhat more sensible with my choices and to try out something a little bit smaller. Well that was the plan anyway.
I ordered the “Smashed Avo and Poached Eggs” which turned out to be another super sized brunch snack! I mean I am not complaining at all, but it was rather large too 🙂
I liked this dish immensely also
The smashed avocado had been mixed with lime juice to give it a real powerful citrus hit. It is not at all subtle it was like walking into a wall of tart lime tang, bang flavour explosion then stop. It did make for a more interesting bite than just a big pile of soft green mush and it took a few bites to get used to it, but I kind of liked it!
They had scattered toasted sesame seeds and some sunflower seeds across the smashed avocado and that added a nice additional bit of crunch to the toppings.
On top of that towering pile of green were two perfectly poached eggs perched having a good look over the tables in the place. I dispatched them pretty quick, slicing into them to release the soft runny orange yolk so that I could mix it up on my fork with the sourdough and avo to get a tasty mixed up mouthful of food.
I have no complaints about this dish, it was all very tasty and was pretty filling as well.
I did have a coffee on both visits and very nice it was too. Well when I say coffee it was a latte, I never really got into proper coffee so just hate me now 🙂
It was a very nice latte though!
Now that I have been a couple of times and basically stuffed myself with a lot of really excellent food, I had to reflect on what I would recommend to eat here. Much as I loved that massive Very major important and serious brunch you need a decent appetite and to be hungry if you are going to attempt it. It is worth it though even at £14 .
If you want something slightly less humungous? then I would probably suggest getting the ‘eggs and sides’ for £9.75.
That way you can get the sourdough toast with the poached eggs and a couple of sides. I would probably get the bacon and the mushrooms, but then again I really want the potatoes too, and ooh can I have some of that sausage as well? well you might as well order the behemoth then 🙂
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Cartwheel Café and Roastery is located part way up the slope at 16 Low Pavement in Nottingham.
NG1 7DL if you are sticking something in your phone to locate them.
You can check them out on their Facebook Page, their Twitter feed, and on their Instagram Profile too